Hanford’s full of
holes
Whistleblowers at the Hanford nuclear
reservation in central Washington now have the federal General
Accounting Office on their side. Although nearly a million gallons
of waste are seeping from Hanford’s underground storage tanks
toward the Columbia River, the Department of Energy has long
downplayed the problem, assuring critics that the soil layers under
the tanks would block the flow of waste (HCN,
9/1/97).
But in December, after the federal
agency admitted waste was moving faster than expected, Sens. John
Glenn, D-Ohio, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., ordered the GAO, the
investigative arm of Congress, to study the issue. Its March
report, Nuclear Waste: Understanding of Waste Migration at Hanford
is Inadequate for Key Decisions, says the DOE hasn’t found out
enough about the soil between the leaking tanks and the water table
– an area called the “vadose zone’ – to make environmentally sound
cleanup decisions.
“DOE’s past efforts have left
the agency unable to answer basic questions about what radioactive
and hazardous wastes are in the vadose zone at the Hanford Site,”
says the report. The report also criticizes the DOE for ignoring
previous warnings, and says the agency needs to fund a
comprehensive plan for investigating the vadose
zone.
The 44-page report is available on the Web
at www.gao.gov. A free copy can be obtained by writing to the
General Accounting Office, P.O. Box 37050, Washington, D.C. 20013
or calling 202/512-6000.
* Michelle
Nijhuis
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Hanford’s full of holes.
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